Are you unhappy with the quality of employees you’re getting for your open positions? The problem may not lie with the candidate pool, but with your ability to attract the right talent. If your job candidates are boring, it may be because your job description is too vague or not exciting enough. If you want to improve the quality of applicants, consider improving your job descriptions. Here are some insider ideas for writing a better job description to attract better applicants.

Sell Your Company

Just like a resume is a candidate’s sales tool, so is your job description. To attract better candidates you need to create a job description that makes applicants feel compelled to apply. That their life will not be the same if they don’t consider a chance to work with you or your company. Don’t lie, but share information that is interesting and engaging.

Showcase the Culture

Part of the sales you can do to attract new employees is to show what your company culture looks like. This doesn’t just attract better candidates, but it will attract the right ones. Culture influences every part of your organization, so the best and most productive employees are people who share your core values and work best in your environment.

Share the Benefits.

You have to show what you can give to an employee. A working relationship should never be a one-way street. Salary and basic benefits are great, but what else can you offer? Are there work from home opportunities? Do you offer options for earning additional paid time off? Can you provide benefits your competition isn’t even considering?

Be Detailed.

Vague job descriptions are also a problem. When an employee doesn’t know what the job is, they aren’t likely to apply. You are also more likely to get unqualified resumes if the job description isn’t specific enough. You don’t have to provide a laundry list of job duties, but provide enough details to paint a picture.

Make It Exciting

Now is time to get creative. How can you draw people into the description and make them want to send their resume? There are a variety of ways this can be done, and not all of them are great. Try storytelling. Telling a story engages readers, so create a narrative that will make people care about applying to your job and working for your company.

Need Help Writing Descriptions?

The employment experts at Meador Staffing can help you craft job descriptions, source potential candidates, and conduct interviews. Contact us today to learn more about work with a leader in Texas staffing.

Early this year, President Obama signed a bill intended to increase the salary threshold overtime pay for millions of U.S. workers. When the bill goes into effect, the threshold for overtime pay will increase nearly double. This means any employee with any job title will be eligible to earn overtime if they do not meet the minimum pay required. The current threshold for exempt employees is currently just over $23,000 annually. The new rule will increase this to over $47,000. More employees will qualify for time and a half if they work more than 40 hours per week. Is your company ready for these new rules? Here is how you can prepare for the change coming in December 2016.

Encourage 40-hour work weeks.

The best way to avoid paying overtime for your exempt workers is to enforce 40-hour work weeks. If they do not clock overtime, you don’t need to worry about paying for additional time and a half. Not only will this help you adhere to the new rules, but it will also help improve the work/life balance of your employees.

Increase your staff.

To help reduce the need for overtime, you may want to hire additional employees within the office. Hiring another full-time employee can often be less expensive than paying overtime hours the staff you currently have employed. For example, you can hire an assistant to help senior staff work more efficiently.

Adjust cost of living raises appropriately.

There may be instances where the new overtime pay can become a de-facto raise. Rather than increasing their base salary during their year-end review, continue with their current salary and adjust pay overtime. You can both evaluate how this works over the next several months and adjust as necessary.

Work with a staffing agency.

Your staffing partner can work with you to place individuals within your business as temporary employees. They can increase your production and not your overtime hours since their employer of record is the agency, not your company. The fee you pay to the staffing company will handle the employee pay rate and any administrative costs, which may work out to less than a permanent salary.

Hiring is hard, there is no doubt about that. It can be an imperfect science since your role as a hiring manager is to evaluate whether or not a person you’ve never met before will be a good long-term fit for your organization. Because of all the uncertainty involved in hiring, there is also a lot of advice provided by anyone who has ever done it before. Some of this so-called perfect advice can be deceiving, so be careful to follow anything that is said to be fool-proof. Here are the top three lies about hiring that you should ignore.

1. You can learn everything you need from a resume.

Many hiring managers assume a resume is a complete picture of a candidate. Yet, candidates are specifically advised not to put every last piece of information on a resume. Consider that most people have enough experience in their lives to fill a book, not just two pages of bullet points. A resume is just an introduction, and hiring managers would do well to use it for that purpose. Use it to determine if someone is generally qualified for your role. Use some of their accomplishments to decide if they might be a fit for your company. Then pick up the phone. Talk to the candidate about what they’ve done and, more importantly, who they are as a person.

2. Hiring a passive candidate is better than an active one.

There is also a bias in HR and staffing that the holy grail of perfect employees is someone still working. That’s a passive candidate. A person who is currently employed and not looking for a new position. Which means they need to be recruited away from their good job to work for you. If they are so easily swayed, will they do the same to you in the future for a better offer? An active candidate is someone who is looking for a new job either due to unemployment or dissatisfaction. They are people willing to be proactive about their careers. If you decide to only hire one or the other, you could be missing out on some great working relationships.

3. There is no such thing as a perfect hire.

Yes, it is possible to find an individual who checks all your boxes. They exist, but they may not take the form you’re expecting. A perfect hire isn’t someone who is a clone of your successful individuals. They aren’t someone who reminds you of you earlier in your career. A perfect candidate can take many forms, the important part is to be open to different kinds of perfection. You can hold out for someone you think is perfect for your open job, but understand that you may be rejecting other perfect candidates along the way and not even know it.